She owned a sign company in the 1990s but gave it up to become a Realtor in DeKalb during the housing boom. She did well enough that when she moved to Mount Morris, she was able to put a $50,000 down payment on a $150,000 house in the village in western Ogle County.

Then the boom went bust.

Wright's income plunged, the value of her house plummeted and she couldn't make her mortgage payments. In one of the great ironies of the Great Recession, precisely because she had so much equity in her house, her lender quickly foreclosed because it wouldn't take that big of a loss.

Wright adjusted by getting retrained as a welder. But then that company went out of business. She found work in a delicatessen but was laid off from that job.

The 55-year-old - she turns 56 on Jan. 18 - hasn't worked for pay since August. On Dec. 28, she became one of the 3,000 people in the region whose federal unemployment benefits ran out.

"I was practically homeless for a while," she said. "I've tried everything I can to find work, but there's just not much out there."

More than 1.3 million Americans lost federal jobless benefits because Congress failed to pass an extension. The federal benefits kick in when state unemployment benefits run out. Without the extension, they reverted to 26 weeks of assistance.

Democrats in Congress are lobbying to extend the unemployment coverage, which added 36 weeks of benefits. Some Republicans have argued that the program, which costs about $25 billion a year, was a Great Recession emergency act meant to be temporary.

According to Democratic congressmen backing another extension, 2,388 people in Winnebago, 328 in Boone and 326 people in Ogle counties had benefits that expired Dec. 28. The benefits average out to $300 a week; that means $915,000 a week has been sucked out of the local economy.

That's a significant drain in a community where the unemployment rates in November were 11.1 percent in Winnebago, 10.4 percent in Boone and 9.7 percent in Ogle. The state jobless rate was 8.3 percent.

Wright isn't going to wait around for Congress. She's starting AAA Program Management - aaaprojectmgmt@yahoo.com - to provide site plans, permitting and other paperwork for sign companies.

"If you've never tried to hang a sign, you'd have no idea how difficult it is. I still have a lot of my old contacts from the days I had my own sign company. I think it will work. It's worth giving it a shot."